On the morning of April 15, 2014, the only thing on my groggy mind was mailing out my tax returns. So I was shocked to see that my first piece of email, from the Fans of Michael C. Ruppert page on Facebook, was an announcement that Mike had committed suicide two days earlier. I had been boycotting Facebook for about two years, but had gotten the message because I had not disabled my account. I merely refused to log in. Then suddenly, I had to.
I then reached out by email to my spiritual group. We call ourselves the Hermetikoi. The Hermetikoi are a group of people in the San Francisco Bay Area who are part of the revival of the worship of the Greek Gods. A priest/esshood of Hermes is forming, and I am a dedicant in this group. I have always wanted to study the Hellenic ways and I finally got my chance a little over a year ago. These are the people to whom I turned as I tried to make sense of Mike’s death.
Mike and I never discussed religion and I was unaware of his turn to Native American spirituality and some Buddhism until I saw a 2013 documentary on him on the day after I learned of his death.
In response to one of their return emails, I wrote:
The worst for me over Mike’s death is that I had recently returned to KPFA where my co-host, Bonnie Faulkner and I had gotten a lot of grief over giving him airtime after 9–11, even though his take on this proved very popular with the audience. [Mike was the very first guest on our show, Guns And Butter.] We didn’t mind if people were skeptical but a lot of staffers there said things like “He’s really out there” without looking at his website, or “I don’t have time for recreational speculation” instead of doing their own research, or “People won’t understand that this is a different show and it will ruin the credibility of Amy Goodman” (People aren’t that stupid that they can’t tell one show from another and I don’t base my reportage on what it might do to Amy Goodman (or anyone else).
I thought, “And here I have been working over there a day or two per week among those people since January, just for a little after-hours access to their recording studio.” I felt dirty, like a traitor. Never again! I’m convinced that they are part of the reason Mike felt he couldn’t stay in this world—people who approached him with ad hominem or otherwise irrelevant attacks, rather than a researched, well-reasoned set of countermanding facts. To have such unsupported negative response from people allegedly dedicated to creating a better world was draining for the hard-working Mike Ruppert, even with the support he did get. You should not have to fight your own side while you are fighting the likes of Dick Cheney. It brings back a lot of ugliness for me.
When I quit KPFA in July 2010, it had nothing to do with Mike. But I have never forgotten or forgiven what certain people there did to him, and by extension, to the four reporters/public affairs producers who found his case convincing.
His book Crossing the Rubicon presents his evidence that 9/11 did not happen because some terrorists in caves in Afghanistan “hate our freedom”. I did not read much of it. I was in frequent contact with Mike back in those days, and felt that I was living the project with him. In fact, an article of mine is in there. When I moved to a much smaller space last year, the 600-page Rubicon was one of the books I gave away to the El Cerrito Free Book Exchange. Surely there is someone out there who can benefit from it.
Now that he is gone, I feel ashamed that I ever went back there. So many of the staffers who were against him are still there. And people within and around the Pacifica Radio Network still are attacking “9/11 truthers” and anyone else they deem a “conspiracy theorist”, as if conspiracies never happen. Mike often said, “I don’t deal in conspiracy theory, I deal in conspiracy fact.” I am angry that Mike is dead and so many of his enemies, even outside of Pacifica, are doing well. I hear Raw Story is figuratively dancing on his grave. Government stenographers, Lily-livered Leftists, F’ing gatekeepers, the lot of them! They all have Mike’s blood on their hands, as well as the blood of all the people on all sides who have been killed directly or indirectly as a result of left media not banding together to take a closer look at what Mike was saying for themselves, and hounding Bush and Cheney out of office in 2002 (the way that increasing press coverage of Watergate helped to hound out Nixon in 1974) , when they discovered Mike was spot on.
Pacifica is in all sorts of financial trouble, as usual; I hope it bites the dust soon! But Pacifica is not alone in this cowardice. I remember that when MoveOn.org wanted to mount a campaign calling for Bush to be censured. I proposed a story to Free Speech Radio News to get a local professor to explain the difference between censure and impeachment, ask MoveOn why they only wanted censure instead of impeachment and ask Prof. Francis Boyle, who had started an impeachment movement at the U. of Ill—Urbana-Champaign, if MoveOn’s tactics were hurting his efforts. FSRN didn’t want the story because they did not want to be seen as a lefty organization bashing another lefty organization. Lily-Livered Leftists! More organizations that should burn!
Many of Mike’s lectures and interviews, as well as some of his radio shows, are on You Tube. I especially recommend the 2009 movie ‘Collapse’ and the under 11-minute video of Mike detailing the three things that he said were guarantors of near term extinction for humans: climate change, radiation (esp. Fukushima) and exponential population growth. I believe that his perception of the reality of our situation and fact that most people in the world are ignoring it, finally drove Mike to take his own life, despite the fact that he now had many things to live for. He had fallen in love with a lady who had moved to California from Colorado to be with him. He also had a beloved dog he had rescued from a pound, a spiritual practice, friends, and music—he had been recording and performing with friends in the last several years and he had a nice singing voice. He had short term possibilities for income that relieved him of financial stress and indicated that some people were still interested in what he had to say. He had his weekly Internet radio show “The Life Boat Hour” that put him in contact with all manner of interesting guests. He had started his autobiography, a project he was doing for himself.
But he was overcome, I believe, by a sense of futility, and to just live out his life for himself, according to his own pleasures, was not his way. He called himself a warrior, and that he was. He was also a shaman. But as a white man born into a military and intelligence household in the early ‘50s, growing up in Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles, he did not have the spiritual training necessary to meld those two roles and do his work without carrying the karma of the world on his shoulders. The help that Native American spirituality, Buddhist meditation, tools taught him by psychotherapist and friend Carolyn Baker, Ph.D., were too little to late for a man first betrayed by people and institutions he trusted to protect him (i.e., the LAPD) nearly 40 years ago.
In my resignation speech to the Pacifica National Board in July, 2010, I briefly mentioned the collapse of industrial civilization. To save time speaking, I shortened that comment from what I had originally written. It might have seemed hyperbolic or out of context in a small meeting largely discussing a radio station’s budget. But I was trying to tell them not to expect a general economic rebound to boost their fundraising. I had learned, from many of the same people who had taught Mike, people like Colin Campbell, Matthew Simmons and Richard Heinberg, that this was not your father’s dip in the business cycle. Though by that time Mike and I largely had fallen out of contact, we were still walking the same road.
Mike left 5 suicide notes. (And yes, he did kill himself and was not knocked off by the government.) In the one that was published on CollapseNet, he wrote of offering his flesh for the children. I think he really could not come to a conclusion one way or the other about whether we would go truly extinct, like the dinosaurs, or suffer a major die-off, due to the energy crisis and population overshoot, which would leave future rump generations of humanity to live on a planet poisoned by the chemicals and radiation previous generations had used to create and maintain industrial “civilization.” A “Mad Max” kind of world.
Either way, during the last years of his life, and by his death, Mike raised the question of what kind of work we should be doing, especially if we are journalists. He liked to get to the roots of issues, as do I. It was frustrating, for example, for me to run the technical side of news programs for KPFA that spent the first 20 minutes of an hour-long broadcast covering the war in Iraq without ever mentioning oil. There were a lot of those.
There are certainly many issues people in our complex world would deem important, especially if they are affected by those issues personally: War, unemployment, foreclosure, rape, LGBT rights, and the surveillance state, are just a few. But if you really stop to think about all of them, they have common roots: broadly put, the economy and the environment. So I will do my part to continue Mike’s work by focusing my journalism on those two topics, especially the economy, which impacts our environment, because some people in high places believe (providing they even care) that we can buy our way out of any environmental problem. If a climatic cataclysm or a nuclear war takes us out, I expect to find Mike on the other side laughing, shaking his head , and saying, “See? I told you so. But you wouldn’t listen!”
In the end, Mike managed to live a life that deemphasized the influence of money. But he probably never came to the conclusion that I have: We must abandon making money and working “for a living,” if we are to have a planet to live on much longer. I am not advocating that we cease to work altogether; that would be impractical and boring. But we must cease the pursuit of money. And I know Mike agreed with the saying, “The love of money is the root of all evil.” The earth itself can no longer afford us using the best hours of the best days of our lives trying to be profitable to someone else so that we can live. We are running out of energy, metals and other natural resources, and destroying much of the natural world, as well as people, through war, so that we can have economies in which people work so that they have money to buy things so that other people will have jobs so that they will have money to buy thing so that other people, etc.
Mike’s efforts to liberate us only cast our slavery into high-relief.
If the worst thing ever said was that man should have dominion over the earth and subdue it, the second worst is that you must earn a living because (fill in the blank)______________ that’s the way it is, or the world doesn’t owe you a living,
The genius R. Buckminster Fuller said in 1970:
We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.
The Buddhists have a concept of right livelihood as part of their sacred eightfold path. Right livelihood is not about making a million dollars an hour playing the game of high finance or putting out incomplete or poorly made products so that people are forced it buy something new every so often. It is not about raping the earth in a production process wherein, as Annie Leonard said in The Story of Stuff, 99% of the materials procured are no longer in use 6 months later. It is not exalting a good’s exchange value over its use value or saying that production for your own use, rather than for the market, is not productive work.
RIP Michael C. Ruppert. You did your best. Sorry you felt you had to go, especially since you found your life partner. As you wrote to me after I told you that I had found mine, there’s love for everyone in this world.
I learned a lot from you. It is now time for me and others to take your work farther. If we are to go the way of the dinosaurs, at least our work will leave a record for alien archeologists that will tell them that some of us did something else besides use the resources of the earth to just survive and push our genes into succeeding generations. And if some of humanity is to remain after Collapse, we will have left a record of where previous generations went wrong and how future humans might make things right again.
CC, 2014, Kéllia Ramares-Watson BY-NC-SA
Kéllia Ramares-Watson is an Oakland-based independent journalist writer and speaker, who is specially interested in covering the theory and practice of the gift economy and other forms of economics that de-emphasize or eliminate money and jobs as we know them now. degrowth economics, demonetization, the sharing economy etc. You can write to her at theendofmoney[at]gmail.com. Follow her on Twitter @endofmoney.
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An end and a beginning: R.I.P. Michael C. Ruppert 1951–2014
Posted on April 30, 2014 by Kéllia Ramares-Watson
On the morning of April 15, 2014, the only thing on my groggy mind was mailing out my tax returns. So I was shocked to see that my first piece of email, from the Fans of Michael C. Ruppert page on Facebook, was an announcement that Mike had committed suicide two days earlier. I had been boycotting Facebook for about two years, but had gotten the message because I had not disabled my account. I merely refused to log in. Then suddenly, I had to.
I then reached out by email to my spiritual group. We call ourselves the Hermetikoi. The Hermetikoi are a group of people in the San Francisco Bay Area who are part of the revival of the worship of the Greek Gods. A priest/esshood of Hermes is forming, and I am a dedicant in this group. I have always wanted to study the Hellenic ways and I finally got my chance a little over a year ago. These are the people to whom I turned as I tried to make sense of Mike’s death.
Mike and I never discussed religion and I was unaware of his turn to Native American spirituality and some Buddhism until I saw a 2013 documentary on him on the day after I learned of his death.
In response to one of their return emails, I wrote:
I thought, “And here I have been working over there a day or two per week among those people since January, just for a little after-hours access to their recording studio.” I felt dirty, like a traitor. Never again! I’m convinced that they are part of the reason Mike felt he couldn’t stay in this world—people who approached him with ad hominem or otherwise irrelevant attacks, rather than a researched, well-reasoned set of countermanding facts. To have such unsupported negative response from people allegedly dedicated to creating a better world was draining for the hard-working Mike Ruppert, even with the support he did get. You should not have to fight your own side while you are fighting the likes of Dick Cheney. It brings back a lot of ugliness for me.
I recounted it in a Mike Ruppert retrospective on the Global Research News Hour.
When I quit KPFA in July 2010, it had nothing to do with Mike. But I have never forgotten or forgiven what certain people there did to him, and by extension, to the four reporters/public affairs producers who found his case convincing.
His book Crossing the Rubicon presents his evidence that 9/11 did not happen because some terrorists in caves in Afghanistan “hate our freedom”. I did not read much of it. I was in frequent contact with Mike back in those days, and felt that I was living the project with him. In fact, an article of mine is in there. When I moved to a much smaller space last year, the 600-page Rubicon was one of the books I gave away to the El Cerrito Free Book Exchange. Surely there is someone out there who can benefit from it.
Now that he is gone, I feel ashamed that I ever went back there. So many of the staffers who were against him are still there. And people within and around the Pacifica Radio Network still are attacking “9/11 truthers” and anyone else they deem a “conspiracy theorist”, as if conspiracies never happen. Mike often said, “I don’t deal in conspiracy theory, I deal in conspiracy fact.” I am angry that Mike is dead and so many of his enemies, even outside of Pacifica, are doing well. I hear Raw Story is figuratively dancing on his grave. Government stenographers, Lily-livered Leftists, F’ing gatekeepers, the lot of them! They all have Mike’s blood on their hands, as well as the blood of all the people on all sides who have been killed directly or indirectly as a result of left media not banding together to take a closer look at what Mike was saying for themselves, and hounding Bush and Cheney out of office in 2002 (the way that increasing press coverage of Watergate helped to hound out Nixon in 1974) , when they discovered Mike was spot on.
Pacifica is in all sorts of financial trouble, as usual; I hope it bites the dust soon! But Pacifica is not alone in this cowardice. I remember that when MoveOn.org wanted to mount a campaign calling for Bush to be censured. I proposed a story to Free Speech Radio News to get a local professor to explain the difference between censure and impeachment, ask MoveOn why they only wanted censure instead of impeachment and ask Prof. Francis Boyle, who had started an impeachment movement at the U. of Ill—Urbana-Champaign, if MoveOn’s tactics were hurting his efforts. FSRN didn’t want the story because they did not want to be seen as a lefty organization bashing another lefty organization. Lily-Livered Leftists! More organizations that should burn!
Many of Mike’s lectures and interviews, as well as some of his radio shows, are on You Tube. I especially recommend the 2009 movie ‘Collapse’ and the under 11-minute video of Mike detailing the three things that he said were guarantors of near term extinction for humans: climate change, radiation (esp. Fukushima) and exponential population growth. I believe that his perception of the reality of our situation and fact that most people in the world are ignoring it, finally drove Mike to take his own life, despite the fact that he now had many things to live for. He had fallen in love with a lady who had moved to California from Colorado to be with him. He also had a beloved dog he had rescued from a pound, a spiritual practice, friends, and music—he had been recording and performing with friends in the last several years and he had a nice singing voice. He had short term possibilities for income that relieved him of financial stress and indicated that some people were still interested in what he had to say. He had his weekly Internet radio show “The Life Boat Hour” that put him in contact with all manner of interesting guests. He had started his autobiography, a project he was doing for himself.
But he was overcome, I believe, by a sense of futility, and to just live out his life for himself, according to his own pleasures, was not his way. He called himself a warrior, and that he was. He was also a shaman. But as a white man born into a military and intelligence household in the early ‘50s, growing up in Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles, he did not have the spiritual training necessary to meld those two roles and do his work without carrying the karma of the world on his shoulders. The help that Native American spirituality, Buddhist meditation, tools taught him by psychotherapist and friend Carolyn Baker, Ph.D., were too little to late for a man first betrayed by people and institutions he trusted to protect him (i.e., the LAPD) nearly 40 years ago.
In my resignation speech to the Pacifica National Board in July, 2010, I briefly mentioned the collapse of industrial civilization. To save time speaking, I shortened that comment from what I had originally written. It might have seemed hyperbolic or out of context in a small meeting largely discussing a radio station’s budget. But I was trying to tell them not to expect a general economic rebound to boost their fundraising. I had learned, from many of the same people who had taught Mike, people like Colin Campbell, Matthew Simmons and Richard Heinberg, that this was not your father’s dip in the business cycle. Though by that time Mike and I largely had fallen out of contact, we were still walking the same road.
Mike left 5 suicide notes. (And yes, he did kill himself and was not knocked off by the government.) In the one that was published on CollapseNet, he wrote of offering his flesh for the children. I think he really could not come to a conclusion one way or the other about whether we would go truly extinct, like the dinosaurs, or suffer a major die-off, due to the energy crisis and population overshoot, which would leave future rump generations of humanity to live on a planet poisoned by the chemicals and radiation previous generations had used to create and maintain industrial “civilization.” A “Mad Max” kind of world.
Either way, during the last years of his life, and by his death, Mike raised the question of what kind of work we should be doing, especially if we are journalists. He liked to get to the roots of issues, as do I. It was frustrating, for example, for me to run the technical side of news programs for KPFA that spent the first 20 minutes of an hour-long broadcast covering the war in Iraq without ever mentioning oil. There were a lot of those.
There are certainly many issues people in our complex world would deem important, especially if they are affected by those issues personally: War, unemployment, foreclosure, rape, LGBT rights, and the surveillance state, are just a few. But if you really stop to think about all of them, they have common roots: broadly put, the economy and the environment. So I will do my part to continue Mike’s work by focusing my journalism on those two topics, especially the economy, which impacts our environment, because some people in high places believe (providing they even care) that we can buy our way out of any environmental problem. If a climatic cataclysm or a nuclear war takes us out, I expect to find Mike on the other side laughing, shaking his head , and saying, “See? I told you so. But you wouldn’t listen!”
In the end, Mike managed to live a life that deemphasized the influence of money. But he probably never came to the conclusion that I have: We must abandon making money and working “for a living,” if we are to have a planet to live on much longer. I am not advocating that we cease to work altogether; that would be impractical and boring. But we must cease the pursuit of money. And I know Mike agreed with the saying, “The love of money is the root of all evil.” The earth itself can no longer afford us using the best hours of the best days of our lives trying to be profitable to someone else so that we can live. We are running out of energy, metals and other natural resources, and destroying much of the natural world, as well as people, through war, so that we can have economies in which people work so that they have money to buy things so that other people will have jobs so that they will have money to buy thing so that other people, etc.
Mike’s efforts to liberate us only cast our slavery into high-relief.
If the worst thing ever said was that man should have dominion over the earth and subdue it, the second worst is that you must earn a living because (fill in the blank)______________ that’s the way it is, or the world doesn’t owe you a living,
The genius R. Buckminster Fuller said in 1970:
We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.
The Buddhists have a concept of right livelihood as part of their sacred eightfold path. Right livelihood is not about making a million dollars an hour playing the game of high finance or putting out incomplete or poorly made products so that people are forced it buy something new every so often. It is not about raping the earth in a production process wherein, as Annie Leonard said in The Story of Stuff, 99% of the materials procured are no longer in use 6 months later. It is not exalting a good’s exchange value over its use value or saying that production for your own use, rather than for the market, is not productive work.
RIP Michael C. Ruppert. You did your best. Sorry you felt you had to go, especially since you found your life partner. As you wrote to me after I told you that I had found mine, there’s love for everyone in this world.
I learned a lot from you. It is now time for me and others to take your work farther. If we are to go the way of the dinosaurs, at least our work will leave a record for alien archeologists that will tell them that some of us did something else besides use the resources of the earth to just survive and push our genes into succeeding generations. And if some of humanity is to remain after Collapse, we will have left a record of where previous generations went wrong and how future humans might make things right again.
CC, 2014, Kéllia Ramares-Watson BY-NC-SA
Kéllia Ramares-Watson is an Oakland-based independent journalist writer and speaker, who is specially interested in covering the theory and practice of the gift economy and other forms of economics that de-emphasize or eliminate money and jobs as we know them now. degrowth economics, demonetization, the sharing economy etc. You can write to her at theendofmoney[at]gmail.com. Follow her on Twitter @endofmoney.